Affective fallacy & Titanic 🚢
#memoriesfromdiaries 💜
[01 July 1998]
Well Titanic ‘came’ to India in 1998! [although it saw a late 1997 release in the US].
The rave reviews for the movie, impelled us bigtime to go watch the movie!
And hence with my friends Prabhu and Wesley, we had planned to go to Sippy theatre to watch Jack & Rose on board their Titanic!
But you see, at the last minute, Wesley said that he’s not coming with us, a decision for which he later ‘repented’ bigtime! 😋 That forms part of yet another story altogether!
In this diary jotting, I’ve given a super-naïve account of the storyline of the movie, without being ‘aware’ of the class consciousness and the other key ‘literary’ takeaways from the movie, that were to have an impact on me quite later on!
Back then, it was the unalloyed ‘emotional effect’ of the movie on me, that mattered above anything else!
Nothing more! Nothing less! 😍
I’ve also highlighted the word ‘moving’ that I’ve jotted down at least twice in the diary entry.
And well, this is exactly the bone of contention for our scholarly New Critics of the early twentieth century!
They seem to ask,
Seriously? Do you guys really evaluate a work of art, (for them a poem!) based on its emotional effect alone?
Don’t you guys have any better yardsticks for evaluating a work of art?
ask Wimsatt and Beardsley while formulating their own sweet principles for their ‘new’ school of criticism, called New Criticism!
But wait! Doesn’t our good ol' philosopher-guru Aristotle tell us - that the very purpose of tragedy is to evoke a sense of ‘terror and pity’ on us?
Doesn’t Edgar Allan Poe, a later bhakta of the aesthetic domain, talk about a work of art (in his case, poetry) as something that ‘excites, by elevating the soul’?
W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley gently and firmly beg to differ on that count!
Folks, listen, you guys are committing an error of the highest order, (an error of judgment) if you seek to estimate or evaluate a work of art (a text) on the basis of its emotional effects on you!
Come on folks, a work of art is pretty much above and beyond the emotional effect it has on you!
Let’s give criticism the rigour and respect of an objective validation that it rightfully deserves, they say, in such ‘full-throated ease!’
Because of this ‘fallacy’, ‘the poem itself, as an object of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear’, so that criticism ‘ends in impressionism and relativism’, feel the duo!
To M. H. Abrams,
this doctrine enshrined in the principles of New Criticism then becomes a clarion call and a ‘claim for objective criticism, in which the critic, instead of describing the effects of a work, focuses on the features, devices, and form of the work by which such effects are achieved’.
Continues M. H. Abrams,
An extreme reaction against the doctrine of the ‘affective fallacy’ was manifested during the 1970s in the development of reader-response criticism.
To be continued…
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